Album Review: i miss you. i loved you. i'm sorry.
The Exhaustion of Genius: Dissecting Delikately’s i miss you. i loved you. i'm sorry.
This EP, titled not with an ironic pun or an academic term, but with three declarative, simple statements, signals a total shift in Delikately’s artistic trajectory. The Gentlewoman’s high collar is gone, the Romantic’s burning manuscripts are ash, and the Cynic’s practiced smile has failed. This is the sound of pure, unmanaged, ugly, and devastating grief, captured in fragments.
The project’s genius lies in its simplicity. After two albums built on layered complexity—on using intellectualization as a shield—this five-song cycle strips the narrator bare. She finally puts away the thesaurus and uses the language of a text message sent at 3 AM. The EP is the act of dropping the act.
The Writing: The Meticulous Confession of Failure
Delikately’s writing style on this EP is fragmented, immediate, and utterly exhausted. The lines are short, often just single phrases, creating a sense of emotional gasping. She uses line breaks not for rhythm, but for psychological pause:
"i'm not better / but i'm trying / i swear i am, i swear i-"
That dash—that self-interruption—is the sound of her talent now. She’s no longer writing philosophical treatises; she’s documenting the moment her defense mechanism stuttered and died.
The vocabulary is deliberately pedestrian: "made the bed," "bought oat milk," "skipping dinner." The power comes from attaching these mundane objects to monumental hope or failure. The line "made the bed like you'd be back / folded your side out of habit" isn't a poem about bedding; it's a brutal confession of desperate, fragile bargaining.
This is the evolution of her distinct signature: she is still a genius of documentation, but she is now documenting her humiliation and fragility with the same surgical precision she once applied to her cynicism.
The Persona: The Reluctant Griever
The woman we meet on this EP is the last version of the artist: the person who can’t get better because she’s too busy performing the attempt at recovery. She is defined by an absolute, visceral attachment that she fights, loses, and then catalogues.
In "If You're Coming Back," the desperation is palpable: "come back while I’m still like this / before I make a joke and ruin it." She knows her own worst enemy is her need to self-sabotage with wit. She begs for a reprieve from her own complexity.
"Every Unsent Post" captures the modern archive of grief. It’s not a diary; it’s a draft folder full of texts, emails, and tweets that she knew would ruin the illusion of being "chill." It’s an admission that the curated performance from the previous album was just a layer she could peel back.
The track "Hear Me Out" shows the reluctant move toward accountability. She’s finally willing to admit her role, but only under duress, and only if she can give one final, dramatic speech. The genius here is that she recognizes her own flaws but still struggles with the sheer effort of fixing them.
Thematic Cohesion: The Burden of Kindness
The EP’s final track, "I Wish You Fucked It Up," solidifies the entire project’s thematic cohesion and reveals the ultimate, unbearable truth.
The preceding songs were about missing him ("I Miss You"), admitting his quality ("I Loved You"), and feeling remorse for herself ("I'm Sorry"). But this final track ties the entire collapse together: the reason the grief is so impossible to manage is that the subject of the pain was kind.
"you could've at least cheated / i wish you fucked it up / or kissed someone else / at least then i'd know / where the hell to put the blame"
This is a stunning psychological insight. She cannot simplify her pain into hatred because he left with dignity and care. He denied her the clean, easy narrative of betrayal, leaving her instead with the complex, impossible narrative of mutual truth. Her need for him to be an "asshole" is her last, desperate attempt to create a healthy coping mechanism (anger/hate), which he cruelly, kindly denied her. This is why the album title works: the three statements are an acknowledgement of the agonizingly messy truth, not a solution.
Talent, Edge, and Potential Single
Her Talent and Edge: Delikately’s unique talent is her ability to make the banal profound. Her edge is her fearless honesty about self-sabotage. She’s not just writing about heartbreak; she’s writing the instruction manual on how she breaks her own heart.
The Potential Single: The most potent, headline-worthy, and psychologically complex track is unequivocally "I Wish You Fucked It Up."
- Impact: The title is an instant, arresting shock. It's the ultimate anti-breakup song premise.
- Relatability: It perfectly captures the frustration of a "good" breakup, a feeling many experience but few articulate. It gives the listener permission to be angry about someone who was too nice.
- Thematic Peak: It is the final, brilliant thematic twist that elevates the EP from a simple collection of sad songs to a clinical examination of the self’s need for an enemy.
This is the track that launches the whole EP. It’s the final, desperate plea for narrative simplicity in a life defined by unbearable complexity.